A Competent Villain
by MaraSargon
Summary: Xana is swapped out for a hypercompetent version of himself. How long will it take for an adult-quality villain to defeat the heroes of a children's cartoon?


_Foreword: This story is based on a character created by my good friend, Flying Ninja. This character is from a more serious re-imagining of Code Lyoko where the full implications of the supercomputer's existence are realized and taken advantage of. This story is written for comedic purposes only, and does not necessarily reflect the creative vision of the original creators of its respective elements._

/

A war was raging across Paradite. With Zhar's forces finally defeated on Earth, the only thing standing between the Paradite Warriors and final victory was a small army of monsters in Sector 5. Zhar knew that eventually they would break through and fire off their anti-Zhar program, wiping him out once and for all. All of his contingency plans had failed; _he_ had failed. Nothing to do now but forestall the inevitable, comforted only in the knowledge that at least he went down swinging.

_What if you could have a second chance?_ For a moment Zhar thought he was imagining things, but the voice spoke again. _There is another world, where the enemies are younger and dumber, and who are used to fighting someone bordering on incompetent._

Zhar thought for a moment. "Sounds tempting," he said, "but it seems a bit... unsporting."

_Since when have you ever cared about being sporting?_

"I suppose you have a point there. There's nothing left for me here anyway, so I might as well take you up on it. Besides, how hard could it be?"

/

Xana was busying himself chasing the Lyoko Warriors off of the forest replica. Their new submarine was proving to be more of a nuisance than he had anticipated, and even though he had prevented the destruction of the replica for now it looked as though this encounter would end in a stalemate. Xana didn't like that his enemies would get away with all the information they'd need to make their next trip a success, but he didn't let it bother him too much. He'd gotten this far; he could handle this.

All of a sudden he felt his grip on reality slipping in a very literal sense. When he got it back he found himself observing a battle in what appeared to be Sector 5; it least, what had been a battle. The monsters were entirely unfamiliar to him, and Xana quickly lost a battle he had no idea he'd be fighting. The people who had destroyed these monsters, whoever they were, started doing something with the console is the Celestrial Dome. Xana didn't know what they were planning, but he figured it couldn't be good. He searched his database for some mantas to summon, but found nothing resembling them, or indeed anything he actually knew how to use.

When the people finished what they were doing, Xana felt a strange new feeling: he soon realized this feeling was terror, as his programming was quickly deleted by a multi-agent program. Were he able to scream he would have done so, but Xana was not the talking sort, let alone a screamer.

/

Zhar found himself observing a rather bizarre scene: a group of children escaping his new domain and encountering little resistance along the way. Even his own enemies would have had to leave the scene shooting.

"That voice wasn't kidding when it said this Xana character was incompetent," he mused to himself. Regardless of the circumstances, he was content to let them go for now. With no familiarity with his current resources, he reasoned that at this point he had a better chance of making things worse than actually defeating these people.

Zhar decided to do some inventory. He found that this virtual world was called Lyoko, and that Xana had been trying to make replica supercomputers with sectors to match. For some reason Xana had wasted resources making the sectors match the general area of each computer, which made little sense to Zhar when just a few full copies of Lyoko would have more power than all these hundreds of mini-replicas. Zhar decided to make consolidating the replicas like this his first priority.

The voice had been kind enough to leave all of Xana's memories behind, so Zhar checked these next. He was surprised to find that Xana had pretty much missed opportunities in every single encounter with the Lyoko Warriors, and that they often won more due to his stupidity than their own genius. Of particular interest was the encounter with something called the marabounta. "Huh," he thought. "Programming's a little messy." He cleaned it up. "A little tweak here." He tweaked it. He watched Lyoko and waited for the children to leave. "Now let's just drop a few of these in each sector." He did it. "Okay, so in one move I've already closed off their only route of attack and elimated its only Achilles Heel by making a bunch of them." He waited a few hours for a reaction, meanwhile upgrading some of the replicas to full Lyoko copies. "And it looks like they didn't even notice." He looked through Xana's memories again. "Hell, knowing these geniuses they probably won't notice anything unless I attack or they try attacking the replica again. And they'll probably take their sweet time with that." He watched as the marabounta in Sector 5 destroyed the Skidbladnir submarine.

He came across a name that Xana considered a threat; Zhar found it bewildering that he apparently didn't think the same of the Lyoko Warriors. That name was Franz Hopper. "Okay," Zhar thought, "a disembodied scientist who is extremely weak and whose greatest weapon is passing on information to those kids once every eternity." Not being one to take chances, though, Zhar decided to kill two birds with one stone. In the past he had created a program called Legion to infiltrate and cripple every government network in the world. Now he would do that again, and have it sniff out and destroy this Franz Hopper while it was at it.

Looking at his handiwork thus far, Zhar was fairly confident he could attack the Earth right now and be done with it. But he didn't let his guard down. "It can't be this easy," he thought. "I mean, Xana may have been incompetent, but there's no way he was this dumb. There has to be something I'm missing."

/

Jeremy was completely dumbfounded. A few minutes ago he and the gang had been joking around about Odd not being able to brag for a day, and how this next trip would be a piece of cake. Now he was looking at a Lyoko covered in a black goo he thought he'd taken care of two years ago. "I swear it wasn't me," he said, as much to reassure himself as his friends.

"So Einstein," Odd said, "what's the brilliant plan this time?" Everyone gathered around in anticipation. After all, Jeremy had always managed to think his way out of these situations.

No such thought came. "I have no clue," he finally answered.

Odd looked confused. "What do you mean? Last time you put a virus in my arrows and just had me shoot the first one. Let's just do it again."

"It's not that simple," Jeremy responded. "Last time there was one marabounta in one sector." He moved his chair over so everyone could see. "There are twelve in each sector, and Sector 5 has an extra one plopped on top of where the Skid used to be."

"So what do we do?" Yumi asked what they were all thinking.

"Nothing," Jeremy said. "I mean literally nothing. There isn't even a place to set you guys down in there." He took off his glasses to rub his eyes. "If I can't find a way to blow these up remotely, there's nothing we can do to stop Xana now."

/

Listening in on their conversation, Zhar felt a bit irked at being referred to as Xana. On the other hand, it meant these kids still had no clue what was going on, so he could suffer a bruised ego for the time being.

At the moment he was perusing Xana's arsenal. The monsters at his disposal weren't the most efficient, but they didn't merit replacing. The child William would make a useful host when he began his dominion of Earth. What really piqued his interest was what appeared to be a pet project Xana had been working on, the colossus. "Sheesh," Zhar thought, "with all the resources it takes to summon this thing I could just summon an army in Lyoko and take over half the Earth while I'm at it." With the lack of action from his opponents he was almost prepared to do just that. Legion had already destroyed Franz Hopper with very little effort and was already entrenched in every government network. In fact if Zhar launched an all-out assault right now it looked as though he'd have Earth in the bag tonight. He decided to err on the side of caution and settle for sending out spectres to posess the leaders of every country on Earth.

Settling for that, he put Legion on standby and sent out some phantom programs to probe the personal devices of the Lyoko Warriors. At this point he was fairly certain they were of no threat to him, but killing them probably wouldn't hurt things any.

/

Jeremy stayed behind to work on getting rid of the marabounta while the rest of the gang left the building. He spent about five minutes non-stop on finding a solution before leaning back and takinng a breath. "How did Xana get this powerful overnight?" he thought out loud. He didn't have time to finish that thought as an alarm went off. He looked at the screen in disbelief. "Forty activated towers!" He didn't have time to react to that either as a spectre flew out of the ceiling and into his mouth. It filled Jeremy's lungs, directly denying him access to all oxygen. He slumped in his chair, lifeless.

/

On the bridge outside the factory, the rest of the gang was wondering the same thing Jeremy had. "I hope this is just a one-time thing," Yumi said. "If Xana does more things like this, I don't see how we're supposed to fight him."

Aelita had her head hung low since hearing the news. "If Xana really is this powerful now, it probably means my father isn't fighting him anymore. And that means-" She didn't have time to finish that, as all their cell phones rang at once. The instant they flipped them open, spectres flew out and into their mouths. After dropping dead to the concrete, the spectres took on human forms and dragged the bodies back into the freight elevator. No one would ever know.

/

Zhar was quickly finding that the conquest of this Earth really would be as easy as it looked. The only threats to him were dead, and the world was putty in his hands. "Huh," he thought. "It really was that easy." He pondered over the easy conquest he was currently launching and barely having to pay attention to. "The people here really are morons." He watched as every human on Earth was being annhilated by his monster armies materializing as they went. "I've never been one for unnecessary challenge, sure. But I have to say, I almost feel... cheated."


End file.
